The Exchange
by onceuponapurpleplatypus
Summary: Chicago. 1920s. A Stebekah fic. Canon through the 3x03 flashbacks. Stefan is the type of vampire who plays games before the kill. Rebekah, an Original, acts as a human prostitute to lure in prey. Their roles crumble when they fall in each other's traps.
1. Chapter 1

The nightclub was dim and yellow. The singer wore a bronze dress made of bangles, her hoarse voice crackling through the microphone. Behind her, the jazz band wore tuxedos shining as bright as their instruments.

Round tables with white tablecloths dotted the club. In the center of the sea of tables, there was a dance floor. The men wore suits like the members of the jazz band. The women wore dresses similar to the singer's which shimmied and clanked as they danced. Waiters poured champagne into towers of glasses and patrolled the room with trays.

A woman that looked around eighteen sat at a table with a champagne glass in her hand. Her dress was tan and covered in white and gold beads. A circular silver pendant with a red gem at the head hung on a chain from her neck. Her fingers, which were gloved in white silk, drummed against the table as she sipped her drink with the other hand.

"May I join you?"

The woman looked up at the man who had approached her and nodded after a moment. Her face remained blank. He slipped into the seat beside her, and his shoes squeaked against the wood of the floor. The woman was silent.

"She's good, isn't she?" The man inclined his head toward the stage. "Gloria has quite the voice."

The woman sipped her champagne.

"Do you like her?"

"Gloria is talented," the woman said. She had a British accent.

The man watched the woman's fingers drum. "Name's Stefan Salvatore. What's yours?"

"Polly Richards."

"That's a pretty name."

She shrugged and raised her eyes to the singer on the stage. A waiter with a tray came by the table. Stefan wrapped his fingers around a glass and thanked the waiter. "Would you like one?" he asked his companion. She shook her head, tilting her own glass in explanation. The waiter left.

"I know about you, Miss Richards," Stefan said after he tasted his drink.

She inclined her head at him. "You do?"

"Oh, yes. I've heard of your business. It's very popular among the men of Chicago."

"This line of work always is." She gave the ghost of a smirk, but it vanished so quickly it was almost unnoticeable.

There was a pause. "Good champagne, wouldn't you say?" Stefan asked.

"Not the best drink I've had," she said.

Stefan raised his eyebrows. He leaned slightly toward her. "What is the best drink you've had?"

The smirk flitted back onto her lips, lingering for a moment longer than it had before. "I couldn't say."

Stefan stroked his glass. "Then it isn't certain that you've had a better drink, is it?"

"I didn't say that." Her thumb and forefinger rubbed a tassel of her dress. She looked at Stefan from under hooded eyes before turning to him with a sudden movement. "You came over here for a reason, Mr. Salvatore. What do you want?"

"I sat with you due to courtesy, my dear. I did not want that pretty face to drink alone." Stefan inclined his glass toward her. "And curiosity. I was merely wondering if your services would perhaps be available to a gentleman such as myself."

She tossed her head back and laughed. It was an odd gesture, shattering the placid demeanor that had weighed down her skin. "It's always about that, isn't it."

Stefan cracked a smile and drank. The woman next to him raised her own glass to her lips for just a moment before answering his unasked question. "Two hundred. Not a dollar less."

He raised his eyebrows. "A bit expensive, isn't it?"

"I always stick to my prices. If you want to find a woman who asks for less, you are welcome to do so."

"Now why would I do that?" Stefan tilted his head. "I am aware that you are good in this line of work."

"You have heard correctly," she said, but her face was still impassive.

Stefan reached into the inside pocket of his coat, retrieved a wad of cash, and laid it on the table."There's two hundred in that pile. You can trust me."

She touched the money so gently it was almost not a touch at all, but rather an exchange of air. "I do not trust anyone, Mr. Salvatore. I'll have to count it."

"As you wish."

She took the money and shuffled through the bills on her palm. When she was satisfied, she turned back to Stefan. "Well, Mr. Salvatore? What would you like to do?"

"I'd like for us to dance," Stefan said, "and then I think we should go to my apartment."

The singer's voice escalated in volume behind them. A couple spun around and around their table, the female's dress flying out like a fan. Stefan extended a hand to his companion. Her face was aflame in the glow of the nightclub's lights. She let her hand fall in his and the two of them stood.

Stefan led her away. The woman did not know that Stefan was planning to lead her to her death, and likewise Stefan did not know that his companion was intending the same for him: Two predators mistaking each other for prey.


	2. Chapter 2

They danced differently than the others. The music was fast, an upbeat swing, and while other couples shuffled and shimmied and twisted across the dance floor, Stefan and his companion swayed as though the band were playing a feverish lullaby. Their bodies were pressed against each other, flesh against skin and pore against cell so that they were almost one being. They moved, slow and sensual, arms all over the other's body, hands slipping into gaps between clothes, fingers kneading sharp-edged circles across skin. Some dancers gave the pair startled looks, but they paid no heed. When the song ended, they left the nightclub together.

Stefan's apartment was bare, and as plain as it was small. It was nothing more than one room, with off-white walls and similarly colored sheets on the large bed in the center. A bookshelf stood in the far corner, filled with what appeared to be notebooks. These were left ignored as Stefan pulled the woman to the bed.

The process started out slow, even though both had done this countless times before. Stefan moved his hands across his companion's body until he reached the stream of buttons in the back. Slowly, his fingers worked a downward path to undo them, and then he slipped the dress over her head. His eyes drank her in for a moment, dark with hunger. The woman stared back unflinchingly, her face still as emotionless as it had been all night.

His hands claimed her hair for his own. He pulled out the barrettes keeping her locks pinned back—first one, then two, three—and her blond curls fell onto her bare shoulders. Then he bent down and crushed his lips to her neck.

She bent into his touch willingly, like a marionette answering to the tug of the puppet master. Stefan breathed in the feel of her skin before moving his lips to her collarbone. His mouth grazed the side of the silver pendant that still hung from her neck. He bent as if to kiss the necklace, but then attached his lips to a spot just below it. She moved her torso in response to him as he crushed violent kisses down her body, from the top of her breast, to her ribcage, to her stomach, and finally to the frayed edge of the cloth between her legs. In a swift, startling movement, he pressed down on the cloth and tore it away from her skin with his teeth, guiding it down and off her legs. He looked at the spot between her legs and the hunger in his eyes blazed stronger.

They were still standing. The force of Stefan's kisses had pressed the woman back against the side of his bed. Stefan stepped away from her to strip himself of his clothing. He didn't take his time, and didn't hesitate until his own underwear was at his feet and then kicked away.

A shift came over him then. He abandoned his trifling with slowness and came at his companion as though he had no more than a minute to take her. He pushed her down onto the bed until she was splayed out before him over the covers and he was hovering over her, holding himself an inch away from her entrance. Without bothering to undo the clasp of her bra or to let his mouth meet hers for the first time, he let out a sound somewhere between a groan and a throaty growl and lowered himself into her.

She arched into him immediately at the moment of contact. He heaved and thrust, and she rocked back with just as much strength as him, perhaps more. At first, his gaze was down, fixed hard on the space between her legs as he pushed inside it and reentered it again and again, but after a while he raised his head to her face. For the first time since they'd met, she was not expressionless. There was an unfathomable, scorching hunger in her eyes, identical to the one in his.

They stared at each other as they repeatedly threw themselves into each other, and the same aggressive craving surged between their eyes, back and forth until the fire surrounding their pupils was so consuming, it made both of their jaws slack and their movements a stretch away from barbaric. Stefan reached the point of release with an animal-like grunt, a sound closer to wolf than man, his body convulsing around her. A second later her body gave a spasm against him as well. Their eyes never strayed from each other's hunger.

And then, in the midst of all the fire exchanged between their eyes, the situation changed in a way that neither of them could have anticipated. Stefan pulled out of her and slid his body upwards, trailing wetness across her legs and stomach, and bent down to her lips as if to kiss her. Two things happened in the breath before his mouth touched hers, both so quickly that there was no way of telling which happened first, or if they both happened at the same time.

One of the things that happened is that Stefan's head snapped to the side of her neck before he inched closer and closer to her skin, his face morphing as he went, transforming into the face of a monster, with churning fiery eyes and two teeth growing sharp and pointed.

The other is that the woman flipped Stefan over with unnatural strength and a blur of supernatural speed and held him down with a face just as gruesome and beast-like as his and with identical fangs perched next to his neck.

It took a moment for the two of them to register what had transpired, to realize what the other had done. When they did, they simply stared at each other, both of their bodies locked in place. Their faces were still contorted with the natural state of their being, of the creature they both were.

They did nothing but breathe against each other as the seconds flew by, their chests heaving together and their own air washing over the other's face. Stefan was the one to break the marble sculpture that they had become together. He laughed, turning his head to the side as he did so, and even though it was a humorless sound, there was a mocking smile scrawled into the corner of his mouth. The laugh washed over the face of the woman pinning him to the bed, washed over her much more heavily than his breath had an instant before. Though the woman's face was painted with the same shock that he still felt, Stefan's words were light and dabbing, close to something like a taunt. "You're not a prostitute, are you, Polly?"

Her retort was surprisingly quick and just as much of a challenge, despite the fact that she was still as frozen as if she were made of stone. "And you're not the usual type of client, Mr. Salvatore."

It was that that finally broke their frozen stance. The woman let go of Stefan and turned onto her side. The fangs receded and their faces twisted back to normal, the beast-like features slipping off and leaving human-like ones in their place once more. The two of them were again in mirroring positions, half-turned towards each other and eying the other with steel and an only partially dissolved hunger in their gazes, naked and panting on the bed.

"A vampire posing as a human courtesan," Stefan breathed, that sardonic grin growing wider on his lips. "How original."

"It's an easy way to get prey," the woman said. "They come to me with money and I give them what they want before taking them entirely for myself. You're no stranger to this, I presume? Am I wrong in guessing that you go after prostitutes often? That you indulge yourself in their services and then take back your money when they're dead?"

He laughed again, and that was all the confirmation she needed. She'd read him as accurately as if she'd dug her fingers into his mind and pulled out everything hidden in the folds there.

They watched each other as warily and intensely as a cat watches a mouse, both of them regarding the other as the helpless mouse, and themselves as the powerful feline. They were tensed as if about to pounce, nails digging into the covers, both waiting to see if the other would make a move.

"So, which will it be, Mr. Salvatore?" she said softly, after a while of them carrying on their silent standoff. "Will you feed on me and then take your money back? Or will I kill you first?"

Their gazes both flickered to the other's neck. It wasn't logical, of course. They were both vampires and had no reason to feed on or kill the other. If they were both being logical, they would have broken their positions and turned away from each other. But they were not being logical. They were caught up in the haze of each other, drunk with the heat of the moment, with the enticing fumes radiating from the other. And so with one simultaneous tense of their muscles, they both pounced at the same time, colliding into one tangled mess of flesh and hair and claw-like hands.

At first, it seemed as though they were equally strong and that neither would dominate the other. But then the woman got the upper hand. She was on top of Stefan again, holding him down forcefully on the bed, more aggressive and barbaric than either of them had been all night. Both of their faces were once again morphed into the mask of the beast. She glowered down at Stefan, her fangs glistening, her eyes feasting upon him, before she shot down and plunged into his neck.

If Stefan had been expecting anything, it wasn't this. He gasped and his entire body arched upwards as the woman's fangs sank deeper into his neck. Then she was drinking from him and it was the weirdest sensation he had ever felt. He could feel the blood flowing out of him and into her, but it wasn't painful. The weirdest part was that it felt … _good_.

No one had drunk his blood since 1864, since Katherine, and back then the experience had always been full of pain and fear and terror. Even when he had been compelled to like it, there had been a layer of horror underneath the calm he felt. But now he was a vampire. It wasn't just that the sensation was enhanced, or that he could feel so much more of it than he could as a weak human with dampened senses. It was the most euphoric experience of his entire life, more so than drinking a human's blood—and it was the most erotic thing he'd ever experienced. Even being inside her minutes before couldn't compare. It had nothing on this.

He could feel his blood rushing up toward his neck from everywhere inside him, could feel himself tingling and squirming all over. He was hardening and all over his body he was flushing with arousal, flushing with the need for the woman embedded in his neck. This was more intimate than the sex. She was inside of him in so many more ways than he'd been in her earlier. In the strangest way he felt connected to this woman, that the veins that surged beneath his skin no longer belonged to him. His blood was hers. His body was hers. His soul was hers. He was entirely bare, open, exposed, even vulnerable to her. She could do absolutely anything to him and he knew that he would let her.

Stefan's gaze turned on her and their eyes met. The vivid green veins spiraling out from her pupils consumed him, and the amount of desire he saw there took his breath away and made his hardness even more uncomfortable. The amount of uncontained, wild euphoria on her face and the blood spilling out from the side of her mouth were what finally broke him. He came for the second time with a near-howl, his knees buckling and his pelvis jutting up, spraying himself all over the woman's stomach. She didn't release his neck through it all.

When it was over, he moaned and pulled himself as close as he could to her body without breaking his skin's contact with her fangs. His thoughts were utterly gone, his mind completely overtaken with the need to be inside her. He needed to take her _right now_ or he wouldn't be able to keep himself together.

But just as he was about to grab her and thrust into her again, she tore herself away from his mouth and broke the connection. Stefan instantly felt emptier, hollow—as though he were lacking her, as though he needed her to be a part of him again. His boiling blood settled and he'd never felt hungrier in his life. He needed to fill himself with her again. But she was turning away from him. He groaned with the closest he'd come to pain all night. The lack of contact was killing him.

Her mouth dripping and her eyes still blazing with green veins, she curved her body so that she was bending down to her stomach. Her bloody tongue flicked out and touched her skin before she was lapping up the remains of his orgasm. Blood mixed with semen on her flesh until it was a crimson-white liquid. The sight of her taking him in almost sent him over the edge for the third time.

Stefan reached for her, but before he could touch her she was no longer there. In a flash, she had slid off the bed and grabbed her dress. It was back on in a blink of a moment, and her shoes came on her feet with the same speed. She turned away, but Stefan couldn't let her leave. He shot to her side in an instant and grabbed her arm, and then he asked one thing, the words so quiet they were almost not there. "How did I taste?"

He didn't know what made him ask it. But for some reason, he was desperate for the answer.

She looked at him for a long time. Her mouth parted slightly as she gazed at his neck, that hunger coming back in full force to her eyes, but her words contradicted this image. "Stiff," she said emotionlessly. "Too tense. You're too tight-assed." Her accent made it come out as _tight-arsed_. With this, her eyes swept over his body, lingering for a moment too long below his stomach.

He almost felt hurt, which was ridiculous. "You're saying I'm stiff after _that_?" he said, the incredulity loud in his voice.

"_Especially_ after that," she said, her lips twitching. Then she was already by the door.

"Wait," he called out, his voice barely a whisper. "Will I see you again, Polly?" He hated how needy the words sounded. He was not needy. He didn't ever rely on anyone else, didn't need anything from anyone else. But he couldn't help it. He needed to experience this again, to feel her in every part of his insides again. He even just needed to be sure that this wasn't the last time he'd see her face.

She hesitated. A smirk took hold of her lips. "Polly Richards is nothing more than an alias. A part of the human prostitute act."

Something plunged inside of him at the fact that she had entirely disregarded his question. He stared after her with a hard jaw and a questioning, thirsty gaze. "Then what's your name?"

This time she was the one that laughed. "Oh no, Mr. Salvatore. That would ruin our little setup, wouldn't it?" And then she was gone so fast that Stefan didn't see her move. The only indication was the sound of the door opening and slamming closed. And the only thing in Stefan's mind was the odd thought that they hadn't said goodbye; the only thing she'd left behind was the trickling sensation of his neck still spitting blood.


End file.
